


Through the Perilous Fight

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 17:49:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5426174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She stares at the shield with its silver star, sitting there beside the hospital bed, and at the man with graying hair who sits there too. She never thought it would come to this, but here they both are anyway. Bruce, Natasha, one-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through the Perilous Fight

**Author's Note:**

> This was my gift for the HulkWidow fandom exchange back in August. The prompts I was given to choose from were, “This isn’t the way things were supposed to be” or “I found my heart. I think you had it all along.” In the end, I tried to incorporate both prompts into this piece, or at least their correspondent feelings. I hope you enjoy it as much as the (intense, goodness) angst will allow. 
> 
> Pure, vague, and hopefully incorrect speculation about the events of "Civil War"

...

She wakes to the sound of a thousand distant voices raised in chorus, singing what might be the final few lines to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

( _“…And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air…”_ they strike that high note with a hard, trembling clarity,… _“gave proof through the night that our flag was still there…”_ )

There is a yellow, antiseptic smell to the cool air. A punctual beep from the heart monitor – her heart monitor, that is, she can feel its electrodes suckered to her skin – flares and fades like a firefly. Natasha keeps her eyes closed, floating inside the vastness of her own anesthetized pain.

But then she opens them, a moment later, because if she doesn’t she will likely have to watch everything happen all over again.

_(“…Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave…”)_

Streetlamps and city lights outside give the darkened hospital room a faint golden tinge. All the monitors around her bed flash various numbers and vital signs, offering reassurance that she is indeed, technically speaking, still alive: all except the pulse oximeter, that is. That one seems to have been taken off its mount, and Natasha follows the wires from her index finger to a chair beside the bed.

Bruce sits there wearing a pair of shredded pants, a borrowed scrub top, his expression illumined in flash-pan white by the glowing screen on his lap. He holds one hand clamped over his mouth. A day’s-growth beard roughens his cheeks.

And there is Steve’s shield, of course, propped up in a corner with the self-contained, austere dignity of a stone obelisk – it probably weighs about the same.

_(“…O’er the land of the free… ”_ this note opens like a sail, like a flag in the wind, expanding to fill all the newly hollowed-out places within her, _“…and the home of the brave.”)_

Natasha waits until the voices have faded before she speaks.

“…You know, I think I said this last week,” here she stops to lick her chapped lips, “but for a man who usually runs away from a fight, you picked one hell of a time to come back.”

Bruce jerks upright as though he’s been slapped.

“Natasha. Oh my God.” He cannot leap to his feet, what with that unwieldy machine in both hands, but he makes a fumbling try anyway. “Should I get the nurse? How do you feel?”

“I seem to vaguely remember getting hit by a nine millimeter uranium round, Doctor. You can probably fill in the blanks from there.”

“I don’t need to. You were in decompensated shock by the time I got you here.”

Natasha blinks, and by then her vision has adjusted enough to put him in focus. Bruce leans over the narrow bed, an action that briefly lays the heat and shadow of his body across her face, and hooks the pulse oximeter back into place. Its digital numbers dutifully inform her that her blood oxygen level is at a promising 98%.

Bruce turns towards the sink. His bare feet slap against the tile.

“Decompensated? Shit.” Her head and shoulders sag. The mattress crackles beneath her, its vinyl shell made to resist retaining both the shape and the blood of its interchangeable occupants. “Guess that means I’m not getting paid.”

“No, but the hospital might be.” He twists the tap and watches water drum against the sink’s bottom. “I broke the emergency room doors on my way in. They must’ve put a good three pints of blood back into you before they could get you stabilized.”

(Natasha fumbles around inside her brain and body, both of which suddenly seem too small for what they have been asked to contain, but can find no memory to confirm this – all she sees is two massive arms, slick and stained red, holding her out before him with the frantic imploration of a child.

“Help.”

All the doctors and staff had taken another step back. He had taken another step forward.

“Help. Help.”)

“Do you need any more pain medication?” Bruce lifts a paper cup full of water, tilts it towards her as though in question, but Natasha keeps her lips pursed together. It would be too much effort to shake her head. “I had them authorize me to administer it, since they wouldn’t put you on a PCA pump.”

Her whole right side is one live, exposed nerve, where they have laid the new skin and closed her back up. It will be a huge scar, if it is given time to scar. Something radiates through her bones.

“No, thank you.” She watches him move to sit down again, although he does not bring the chair any closer. They listen to the mechanical noises of her body fill the silence, waiting, until finally Natasha goes first. “Where’s Stark?”

“The Central Security Service took him for questioning. Clint talked them into letting him ride along as an escort, but I think he was actually bugging the deputy director’s suitcase. He’s had me texting updates on you every fifteen minutes for the past six hours. Fury called everybody else back upstate before the fallout could really start.”

“Barnes?”

“He’s still down in the – He’s with Steve.” Bruce studies his hands. “They wanted to take his body away earlier. I guess it was supposed to be for, uh. For evidence. When James found out I thought they were going to have to tranquilize him, but Sam managed to talk him down.”

Natasha lifts a hand, clumsy with tubes and needles and surgical tape, but forgets what she intended to do with it and lowers it back down.

“How long has that crowd been out there?”

“Since 8:00, maybe. That was when word finally hit the news. Some of them brought lighters and candles, so the police were called at first, but all they’ve done so far is sing. It was ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ for a while.”

“I don’t know that one.”

“I wouldn’t either, except my aunt’s church choir needed a spare tenor one summer. It was written during the Civil War.” He looks from his hands to the floor, looks at anything except for her. “The American one, I mean.”

Beyond the hospital room window, ten or eleven floors below, somebody is giving a speech – and farther below that, beneath the concrete and asphalt under their feet, there is a temperature-controlled basement full of bright lights and numbered, stainless-steel drawers that have been designed to glide easily open and shut.

It has also begun to rain, Natasha notices, round droplets against the glass. She watches the light as it ripples and shivers over the shield.

There is no need to ask why it’s there.

(What command had the sniper been given? What information had he been provided, or denied, before threading a single full-metal jacket bullet neatly through his target’s left eye?

_“Captain America has established himself as a threat to national security,”_ perhaps. _“Take whatever measure is necessary to neutralize it – And while you’re at it, take care of the Russian spy too.”_

But speculation will be all she has to go by now. After the second shot struck her in the side and broken several ribs, Tony had turned and aimed and fired as well: and the sniper had dropped, without sound or protest, onto the roof where he’d been positioned.)

“We talked about it, once,” Natasha says, with no other way to begin. “Steve and I.”

Bruce only nods. His face changes and shifts with the light, too, as though he’s standing beneath the shadows of a tree. She knows he is skilled at this, the attentive and listening absorption of other people’s pain, and goes on.

“I told him the balance was all wrong. It takes too much wrist torque to make it really worth throwing around the way he d—did. He just said I could get used to it, if I tried hard enough.” She closes her eyes again. “I had no idea the bastard would ever hold me to it.”

“I’m sorry, Natasha.”

“Don’t say that.” A hook goes through her throat. “People only say things like that when it’s too late to do anything else, have you ever realized that? They used to say it all the time before I killed them, too. They never even bothered to add what it was they were apologizing for – just ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ As if it made any difference to me.”

“It did,” Bruce says, “didn’t it?”

(And sometimes they would curse her, or beg her, or offer the names of allies and enemies and family members to be given up in exchange for their own lives: as if Natasha herself had any part in the decision, which was naturally stupid to assume.

Worse than all that, however, had been the people who said nothing.

They would lay their necks against her knife for an easier cut, or turn their bodies to present her with a better target, and there had always been a deep, easy calm sitting behind their eyes. They had gone to their deaths like royalty in a tumbrel, and all of them seemed to be telling her the same thing just before they did.

_‘Now I know something you don’t.’)_

Natasha hears a dangerous crack in her voice, fractures opening through the thin ice.

“I don’t know if it did or not.” She swallows, opens her eyes once more to look at him. Her vision blurs again. “I don’t even know why Steve wanted me to have it, honestly. It should be Barnes, or Wilson. None of this was supposed to happen.”

“But you’re going to accept to accept the shield anyway.”

The pain pins Natasha to her body, and she feels herself narrowing down into the small, tight space of what she answers next.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“No. But nobody else should have to, either.”

Bruce shifts in his seat. The hair at his temples, she has noticed these past few days, has turned completely gray. “I think that’s why, then.”

“Why what?”

“That’s why he wanted you to have it.”

“I –”

She looks at him.

(A year ago their intelligence had located him in Apayao Province, in the Philippines, treating typhoid fever and dengue virus and sitting attendant to those for whom he could do nothing else. They had gone so far as to present her with a marked map, aerial photographs, the name of a contact who could meet her at a private airfield outside Kabugao and escort her to the interior.

And she had imagined the hand reaching out, the quinjet’s screen going blank with the words still hovering around her: _I need you, I need you, I need you._

Then Natasha had folded up the papers, slipped everything into her pocket, and said nothing further on the matter; and Bruce had returned last week, amidst the chaos and news reports. This is the first private conversation they’ve had since.)

Words rise up through her, words she has been collecting over the past months.

_(I need you, I need you, I need you.)_

But now, Natasha realizes, she has forgotten what she planned to say next. In fact, she has forgotten every single angry word she’s been carrying; perhaps she’s bled them out.

She will remember later, granted they are both still alive when this is finished. It is just as likely that they won’t be, although she would put better stakes on his life – she trusts the Other Guy with that much, at least, regardless of what Bruce thinks – than on her own.

She listens to her own heart for a moment longer. Well, then.

“…You plan on sticking around this time, Banner?”

A tremor goes through Bruce’s jaw, although this might be the rainy light; or it might not. Either way, his voice is steady.

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.” He seems ready to turn his eyes away, but changes his mind. “Running isn’t the answer.”

Natasha lifts a bloodless hand, as much as she is able, and makes a gesture.

“Prove it.”

Bruce stands up.

The hospital bed is uncharitably narrow, starched white sheets that will no doubt be washed and starched again and reused when she is gone – and so Bruce must bend and turn himself in several places, a kind of orderly collapse, in order to lie down beside her.

He curls an arm lightly over her side. One of his legs hooks together with hers at the ankle. His chest presses its warmth to her back, his face comes to rest inside the curve of her shoulder. It is a decent enough fit, she thinks.

Natasha reaches up to take Bruce’s hand here, although her fingers do not obey at first. His palm feels rough. She has memorized it enough to know these calluses along his fingers are new.

“Your hair is longer,” he notes.

“Yeah, thanks. You could use a trim too.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that. I like it.”

And how odd, that it should be this – a stupid, passing remark – which finally makes her sigh, and sigh again, as though she is breathing through a straw, and in a moment she knows the sighing will turn into something else.

But before it does, before she can look over at the shield again ( _’Now I know something you don’t’)_ and feel herself drifting upwards into that blank, voided space of whatever is to come, she hears him speak very quietly against her now-longer hair.

“It’s okay. You’re…” there is a strain in his voice, like a tightened wire, “…we’re going to be okay.”

Natasha does not have the energy or the humor to laugh at this.

“You want to swear to that, Bruce?”

“On my life.” He says this with deliberate finality, as though ascending a step. “If you want it, that is.”

(It is foolish, Natasha knows, reminiscent of that first helpless lie she’d told him back when they were both strangers to one another.

But nobody has held her like this in a long, long while, which must count for something.)

“Okay.” She nods. “Fair enough.”


End file.
